Apple in China

The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

De: Patrick McGee

Narrado por: Fred Sanders

For listeners of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and Chris Miller’s Chip War, a riveting look at how Apple helped build China’s dominance in electronics assembly and manufacturing only to find itself trapped in a relationship with an authoritarian state making ever-increasing demands.

After struggling to build its products on three continents, Apple was lured by China’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Soon it was sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the world’s most sophisticated supply chain. These capabilities enabled Apple to build the 21st century’s most iconic products—in staggering volume and for enormous profit.

Without explicitly intending to, Apple built an advanced electronics industry within China, only to discover that its massive investments in technology upgrades had inadvertently given Beijing a power that could be weaponized.

In Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. The book highlights the unknown characters who were instrumental in Apple’s ascent and who tried to forge a different path, including the Mormon missionary who established the Apple Store in China; the “Gang of Eight” executives tasked with placating Beijing; and an idealistic veteran whose hopes of improving the lives of factory workers were crushed by both Cupertino’s operational demands and Xi Jinping’s war on civil society.

Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised “rebels” and “troublemakers”—the company that encouraged us all to “Think Different”—devolved into passively cooperating with a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.

©2025 Patrick McGee (P)2025 Simon & Schuster Audio

Excellent

I had no idea how dependent our current economy and technology is trapped in China

Stunning implications

The reportage by this honored business journalist is deep, original, and points to a situation no one else is paying attention to at all—how deeply Apple has fallen into the clutches of the Chinese Communist Party. When the President demands re-shoring of iPhone manufacture, he obviously has no idea that what he’s asking for is virtually impossible. I’ve been a certifiable Mac-head since the 1980s and I’m sad to see how insatiable demand for iPods and iPhones and shareholder greed have trapped a great U.S. company in an economic vise. The implications don’t stop with manufacturing. The safety and security of chip production on Taiwan is at stake and, by extension, American security. By the way, business nonfiction can be riveting.

Performance is so robotic it’s distracting.

Whether this is AI or a person reading it is so distracting from the content.

The details and research that went into the book is impressive.

Great work. Now we know what to look out for in the China-US tech war.

An excellent study of modern economic and political realtors in today's world.

This is a long and in-depth history of Apple's history and their involvement in world and Chinese economics. It is well read by the narrator Fred Sanders. I listened at 1.6x speed and it was easy to understand Fred's reading throughout.

The book is also extremely well written. The author, Patrick McGee, gives tons of detailed history and explanation, but in a way that is never boring and is easily understood. The pacing of the writing almost had a fictional novel feel to it. When I had to stop listening, for whatever reason, I couldn't wait to get back to it.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Apple, world economics, world politics, or just interested in "how things work".

This is a fantastic living case study in what I call "Industrial Systems Engineering & Transformation"

If you wanted to engineer the transformation of an industry, build a wildly successful business, and in the process lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by satisfying global consumer demand for a product, how would you do it?

Apple stumbled into the answer, and in the process has locked itself into a tight embrace with China.

Patrick has chronicled that story in stunning detail.

Ps: I own the book in Audio and Hardcover. I am building an pioneering early-stage Industrial Transformation & Supply Technology Venture Capital Firm, and so I expect to be referring to this book a lot.

Disturbing and Equally Important

I was a very early adopter to Apple products, all the way back to 1984. This book is clearly researched well, almost all of the Macintosh history rings true with my own understanding of its development. But had no idea that ALL of it went to China decades ago. We have trained them well, and almost all of us are complicit. And I’m typing this on an iPhone 14. I won’t upgrade to the AI version, there’s no reason for me to believe it won’t be loaded with CCP malware. And I’ll probably go to a Samsung phone next.

the movie is going to be insane

if someone doesn’t turn this into a movie, the world will be at a loss. this would be more riveting by 100x compared to something like The Social Network.

Predicts the Future

No matter what the Trump administration wants to do, Apple can't leave China in the next 5 years.

Behind the curtain of Apple operations

This was really good. I knew that Apple had complex relationships with China and other countries, but this really lays out the development and how we got to where we are today. And also the risk that looms.